Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Calling for an intervention at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“I would have been your president if…..” (Hillary
Clinton yesterday in conversation with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour) “If Comey had
not written and released “that letter” and if Putin had not interfered with the
election”…..and while there is a modicum of truth in both of those
“influences,” taken together they do not account for the election result.

While trump was calling her ‘crooked Hillary’ and
prompting his audiences to chant ‘lock her up’ in a mock kangaroo court,
Hillary was expressing an excess of disgust at both her opponent and his
supporters (remember those “deploreables”?). So repulsed by his person, his
behaviour and his attitudes especially to women was Hillary that she forgot to
shine a persistent and bright light on her policies to hep people regain some
semblance of normalcy, security and hope.

Bullies have a tendency to shape the agenda for the
simple reason that they have forcefully declared that reason, facts and
negotiation, collaboration and working together are ALL off the table. And
people who refuse to stoop the lowest rung on the ladder by becoming bullies
are infused and infected with righteous indignation…so much so that there is
always the danger that the bully will overcome his opponent given that he is
motivated by the need for complete control.

The mafia have discovered the benefits of bullying,
both within and outside their organization. ISIS, AlQaeda, AlShabab, AlNusra
have also deployed the strategies and tactics of the bully, for their own
purposes. Winning is everything, and the lives and character of their opponents
matter not a whit, so long as they triumph. No one can argue that trump is a bully, having rehearsed
the role for decades in the less than savoury business of real estate where
bribes and deception and failure to perform to contract abound. The victims of
the real estate sector populate every town and city in North America from the flooded
basements without necessary drains to the leaky roofs, to the bankruptcy liens
imposed by the courts on properties, to the plethora of short-cuts that builder
know more about than consumers. And trump, like the slime that rises to the
surface of standing water, has risen to the top of the pool of stagnant and
infested water that is the real estate sector.

It is not as if the United States itself does not have
a record of bullying when their
interests in oil, for example, were paramount. They have propped up, armed and
championed bullies in other countries, while papering over the acts of those
dictators in the western media. It was the Reagan administration, ironically in
the light of history, through Donald Rumsfeld that provided chemical weapons to
Saddam Hussein, prior to declaring, in the Bush II administration, the threat
of weapons of mass destruction (those same chemical weapons). Police brutality
on the high seas and on foreign soil is really no different from police
brutality on the streets of American cities so Americans have more than their
share of blood on their hands from the exercise of their bully archetype, both
at home and abroad.

If it takes trump’s election to remove the scales from
the American eyes to their own complicity in his election, and fake news is
dealt a death blow, along with the American bully archetype, then the world
will have been served better than prospects appear today.

To use the nuclear option of full-frontal character
assassination of Hillary by magnifying
and exaggerating her real flaws, while mauling women and bragging about it, as
an election campaign strategy is, for most self-respecting people in 2016
(election year) a step too far. For
trump, however, and his gang, it is just another ‘day at the office’.

A Boston psychiatrist appearing on The Last Word, with
Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC last night, declared that trump is “out of touch
with reality, and creates and lives in his own reality”. On the same programs,
the host interviewed the author of the cover story to this week’s “The New
Yorker” entitled, “How trump could be FIRED”. The story postulates two
scenarios through which his demise might be accomplished: through the 25th
Amendment, or through impeachment. What is also striking is that The New Yorker
writer reports that elected representatives of both parties, in both the House
and Senate, are quietly talking about the need to get rid of this plague. Of
course, they will not permit their names or their quotes to be printed,
recorded or reported. Everything at this point is “off the record”…and any
breach of that compact would ostracize any reporter so bold and brazen.

If this is an early spring-sprout of green hope in an
otherwise asphalt political desert, the world can only hope that it will find
both water and sunlight to continue to grow. Of course, the growth of this
glimmer of a sprout will not be quiet and calm, like those daffodils that now
dot the backyards. It will be noisy, and potentially violent, as the country
goes through the throes of confronting decades even centuries of “national
Shadow”….that buried unconscious memory that will only be repressed and denied
for so long.

As an exercise in catharsis, the purging of guilt and
shame at the ownership of the national bully, the betrayer, the deceiver and
the narcissist will make the total cathartic expression of the combination of
all of Shakespeare’s tragedies look like a Methodist Sunday School picnic. And
Hillary’s Methodist roots will be uprooted in the cataclysm….the one path to a
national cleansing and healing, for which the world has long waited.

Consumed by the addition to dominance, hard power,
mountains of cash and the need to sustain the addiction, America is like the
neighbour whose recycling boxes are filled with magum liquor bottles, while the
addiction to alcohol continues to control his silent, desperate life. It is not
just trump who is out of touch with reality, but through his entry into the
Oval Office, he has demonstrated that the system itself has fallen into the
same entrapment of generating and then becoming dependent on its own construct
of a reality outside the reality shared by the rest of the world.

Whether or not those around trump, including the
sycophant Pence, Bannon, Kushner, Ivanka, Tillerson and the rest of the cabinet
can or will come to their senses about the truth of their, and the country’s,
predicament, is an open question. A similar situation confronted the White
House, at the domestic level, during the Ford presidency, when the Ford family
had to, and agreed to, confront Betty Ford, who had regrettably grown dependent
on both prescription drugs and alcohol. The film that documents this
intervention, while unsettling, upsetting and cathartic, nevertheless, brought
about not only Mrs. Ford’s treatment, but the long-term treatment of thousands
through the Betty Ford Foundation.

Intervening in the life of an individual, with family
and professional practitioners, is far more feasible than a similar
intervention in the life of the nation. Conflicting motives, especially motives
of loyalty, sacrifice, even love, and ambition will inevitably challenge other
motives to bring truth, reality and a sense of perspective to the Oval Office,
the White House and thereby to the nation and the global community.

The damage already done to the capital, the state, the
nation and the world, while serious and significant, can still be righted, so
there is still time for the massive and highly complicated and even risky
intervention. The whole world watches in hope and in silent prayer that the
United States will come to her senses, accept that the current course is not
only unsustainable but, more importantly, dangerous for the most vulnerable
within her borders and for the people of the planet. Millions within and
without struggle every day to survive, some within in abject fear of
deportation, and without in terror of death through starvation, disease, military-terrorist massacre, or even
a dictator’s bombs. All of us want and need clean air and water and access to
health care, and every sign from the current administration signals increased
dangers on the ‘survival’ file.

These are not Republican or Democrat agenda items:
they are human issues. And they demand a human response.

Can and will the world support the Americans through
their darkest, self-imposed nightmare at the official political level?